All-in-one portable DJ rig ready to bring the party to US shores

If that great night on the town turns into an after-hours party at a friend's house and you want to show off your Digital Disc Jockey mettle, the odds of you happening to have a Numark iDJ about your person are pretty remote. You may well have an iPhone packing IK Multimedia's DJ Rig app, but what are the chances you've also remembered to bring an iRig MIX? Korea's JD Sound is busy readying its PDJ portable stand-alone DJ system and music production studio for US release, which puts everything you need to get your groove on into one fairly pocket-friendly unit.

The PDJ has been designed to offer the features of a full-sized system in a much more portable format. It has 320 x 240 pixel resolution color LCD touch panels left and right for swipe menu and feature access, virtual turntables and sample playback control. There's a mixing and effects section inbetween, with six rotary controls surrounded by LED status lights, Play/Pause and Cue transport buttons (one for each "deck"), LEDs that beat in time to the music, and a cross fader.

The mix can be monitored before it gets unleashed on party goers by plugging some cans into the 3.5-mm headphone jack (which has a signal-to-noise ratio of 100 db and total harmonic distortion of 0.009 percent at 1 KHz) to the front of the unit. Next door is a microphone input for making announcements or adding some impromptu beat box. To the rear is a stereo line-out port (100 dB S/N ratio and 0.015 percent THD at 1 KHz), a line-in jack and a mini-USB connection.

The latter is used for firmware upgrades and file transfer to/from a computer, and to juice up the unit's Li-Pol battery, which should enable users to mix, scratch, record, and produce music on the move for 12 hours per charge.

The 250 x 66 x 16.8 mm (9.8 x 2.6 x 0.6 in), 286 g (10 oz) PDJ has 4 GB of internal storage, though only half of that is available for your 320 kbps MP3 or 16-bit WAV tracks. This means the majority of your music will likely be fed into the system via the included SD card slot next to the power switch on the right side of the device. The remainder of the storage is split between recording space and the operating system/software. The unit sports a 16 beat step sequencer, 8-slot sampler, digital effects such as flanger, delay, phaser and decimator, auto looping and a three-band visual EQ.

Already available in Dubai, Singapore, Japan, and Korea, JD Sound has confirmed that US consumers will be able to buy the PDJ this (northern) summer for a retail price of US$600.

While Paul is loath to reveal his age, he will admit to cutting his IT teeth on a TRS-80 (although he won't say which version). An obsessive fascination with computer technology blossomed from hobby into career before the desire for sunnier climes saw him wave a fond farewell to his native Blighty in favor of Bordeaux, France. He's now a dedicated newshound pursuing the latest bleeding edge tech for Gizmag. All articles by Paul Ridden

...which, as anyone can see, is a fairly high-end recorder as Android apps go; and rivals the iRig app (even though the iRig app is way cool. From my conversations with people who've fooled around with the iRig mics, they should work with Tape Machine; and even if they don't, the iRig app's only 8 bucks.

So, then, as a quick-and-dirty field recorder, one of those iRig mics (or any mic of one's choosing, using the iRig Pre), plus either Tape Machine or iRig's recorder app, and one has a quite interesting little recorder!